There's a scene near the beginning of The American where George Clooney’s enigmatic Jack encounters a woman named Mathilde (Thekla Reuten) to discuss business pertaining to an assassination. Mathilde wants Jack to craft a custom-made rifle to be used in this assassination and Jack obliges her after requesting the rifle’s specifications in a suave, but monotone manner. The way this concise shop talk of theirs plays out is pivotal in that it sets the tone for the remainder of the film. It’s cold and mechanical much like the weaponry these characters handle for a living and offers no insight into their personalities. The audience is thus left with what’s on the surface; a shared interest (business) and little else.
As an obscure slow burn, American manages to work on somewhat of an atmospheric level thanks in part to Anton Corbijn’s (Control) gorgeous direction and keen eye for detail, but attempting to invest some form of emotional interest in Jack’s mission is where you begin to realize Corbijn's and 28 Days Later scribe Rowan Joffe's thriller slowly derail. The story (an adaptation of Martin Booth’s novel "A Very Private Gentleman") follows a particularly narrow line structurally. Jack, a hired gun who flees off to a remote Italian village following a botched assignment in Sweden is contracted with a final job through his handler Pavel (Johan Leysen) which involves designing the custom-made rifle mentioned earlier. During his stay, Jack is hounded by a Swedish assassin, considers seeking redemption with the aid of a local priest and falls head over heels for an archetypal hooker with a heart of gold. Each of these plot points, while not necessarily groundbreaking for the genre, might have worked to some degree on paper, but they lack weight on screen. None of what pans out during the course of this film is especially engaging, and therein lies the rub.
The Swede hired to kill Jack pops up intermittently and is only utilized as a tool to contrive tension here and there. The priest (Paolo Bonacelli) is introduced as a figure that might potentially play an important part in pushing the redemption angle, but his entire arc is ultimately squandered. And Jack’s relationship with dubious prostitute Clara (Violante Placido) suffers from an inadequate amount of character development, yet the film bookends on the notion that theirs was a passionate, yet tragic affair the likes of something Shakespearean.
It goes without saying that the film’s biggest hang-up is that each interaction referenced above is stale in execution, and a small share of the blame rests on Clooney’s uninspired screen presence. American is sort of akin to Michael Clayton in the sense that it’s a film that doesn't call for the actor’s trademark charm, but Clooney verges on being borderline comatose (as a contract killer, of all professions) it’s almost unnatural to think of him as anything other than a common tourist – despite some gratuitously placed tattoos. The script, of course, isn't without fault; ripe for a magnetic character study treatment, it fails to live up to its intrigue and makes little effort at cracking beneath the surface of Jack’s psyche.
At its best, American is reminiscent of Jean-Pierre Melville’s quiet thriller Le Samourai, a classic that also subverts the conventions films of its genre tend to abide by so often. Difference is, Samourai paces itself at a rate that holds the viewer’s attention with sequences that never stall the production, whereas American prolongs its more mundane elements (the assembling of a gun and its parts for instance) without much of a payoff substance-wise come the climax. Both low key shoot ‘em ups pride themselves on being succinct, but while one is firing on all cylinders, the other is firing on none.
6/10
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